Self-enhancing use involves the fulfillment of self-accomplishment needs (Maslow, 1954; Winter, 1996). Users want to discover, understand, and learn for themselves about any IT that they use (‘‘He learned by himself because he really wanted to; he kept asking everybody and anybody around him questions about it, until he had all the answers he needed”: journalist, talking about one of his friends). They do this to enhance their own development and to fulfill their general desire to discover, understand, and learn (‘‘I like to know about things, to discover new things. . .Computers and software help me do this”: student). Self-enhancing use is often accompanied, at least after initial training has been completed, by self-training (‘‘I learned about IT on my own. . .completely. . . I learned because I wanted to. It was not very difficult. First, I learned to type, and then I found things out”: retired executive) and a thorough use of most functionalities of any software utilized (Walsh et al., 2010). This type of use might be considered as linked to the exploration use investigated by Devaraj et al.(2008), the dimensions of usage investigated by Sun (2012) (‘‘trying new features,” ‘‘feature substituting,” etc.), and the finesse dimension highlighted by Munro et al. (1997).
SELFENH1 If I cannot manage to use a piece of software, I try to understand why
SELFENH2a If I cannot manage to use a piece of software, I will not bother to find out why
SELFENH3 When using software, if I am confronted with a problem I do not understand, I like it when I find solutions by myself